BOY OH BOY OH BOY

Clockers" (18) screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin UCI, Tallaght

Originally to be directed by Martin Scorsese who opted to make Casino instead, the film version of Richard Price's meticulously researched novel Clockers, was taken over at Scorsese's suggestion by Spike Lee. Clockers was adapted by Price himself for the screen before Lee radically reworked Price's screenplay. The story has been relocated from the fictional New Jersey town in Price's novel to a rundown Brooklyn neighbourhood, and the film takes its title from the slang term for the lowest level of drug dealer, the type who are on the streets around the clock.

The redoubtable Harvey Keitel stars in Clockers as a cynical homicide detective investigating the murder of a Brooklyn drug dealer. There are two suspects in the case a hostile 19 year old clocker (played by very impressive newcomer Mekhi Phifer) who peddles crack cocaine and already has a stress induced ulcer, and his hardworking older brother (Isaiah Washington) who confesses to the crime. Overshadowing both their lives is the hard edged, middle aged cocaine dealer played by Delroy Lindo in a virtuoso performance.

Working from another writer's source material for the first time, Spike Lee unsurprisingly shifts the emphasis from the white cops on the case to the young blacks caught in a spiral of crime the role of Keitel's partner, played by John Turturro, a regular actor in Lee's films, is so marginal as to make no impression.

From Lee's characteristically arresting opening credits sequence (in this case, a montage of snapshots showing black victims of crime), Clockers is charged by a deep concern for, and raw anger at, a community which is killing its own members through drug dealing and black on black crimes. You're selling your own people death," a furious mother yells at the young clocker who gives gifts to her impressionable schoolboy son.

Although this gutsy and involving movie vehemently emphasises its anti drugs message, it is the least heavy handed of all Lee .5 films and the visual style is, similarly, less ostentatious. This vibrant and passionate picture marks Lee's finest achievement since Do The Right Thing.

"Johnny Mnemonic" (18) Savoy, Unniplex, UCIs, Virgin, Dublin

Adapted by William Gibson from a short story in his 1986 cyberpunk collection, Burning Chrome, and directed by the New York painter, sculptor and music video director Robert Longo, Johnny Mnemonic is set in a dystopian future in the year 2021. It features an impassive Keanu Reeves in the title role, as the cybernetically enhanced memory courier who dumps his childhood memories when he is hired by industrial smuggle is to carry a vast amount of data in a computer chip in his brain. The data contains the cure for a futuristic disease, NES, which the huge pharmaceutical corporation, Pharmakon, wants to keep oft the market.

Data overload is not the only threat to Johnny Mnemonic's life. The Yakuza, who have become the world's most powerful crime syndicate, are working for Pharmakon. The Yakuza sector chief, Takahashi (played by the Japanese star, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano), distrusts his own men and secretly hires the ruthless bounty hunter known as Street Preacher (Dolph Lundgren) and orders him to bring in Johnny's head cryogenically preserved.

Longo's inauspicious cinema debut throws away the narrative's quite tantalising concept and diminishes it through vapid dialogue, unremarkable graphics and animation and a poor sense of pacing. A version running 15 minutes longer was released in Japan, presumably with more toot age for the Takeshi fan club. The movie's eclectic cast, all saddled with thankless roles, also includes Ice T, Henry Rollins, Dina Meyer, Udo Kier and Barbara Sukowa. At least Keanu gets to look neat in smart suits and a tight haircut.

Helen Meany adds

"The Horseman on the Roof" (15s), Light House, Dublin

There's just no point in puzzling over the way this film's invincible duo, Angelo (Olivier Martinez) and Pauline (Juliette Binoche) manage to ride unscathed through plague ravaged Provence, while all around them the putrid, crow peeked corpses pile up. We are in the realm of romance and chivalry here, of love in a time of cholera. Provence in 1832 is the setting for Jean Paul Rappeneau's loving homage to the world of Dumas and Stendhal, in this adaptation of Jean Giono's swashbuckling nostalgic novel, Le Hussard Sur Le Toit.

Olivier Martinez plays the passionate Italian patriot, Angelo, exiled in Provence, longing for his homeland and his mama. His flight from some dastardly Austrian agents takes him into the disease ridden towns, where hysterical fear of infection is causing mobs to run riot and villagers to flee from their homes.

Glimmers of welcome humour appear with the character of Pauline (Juliette Binoche), a courageous noblewoman who is searching for her husband. Older and more confident than Angelo, she teases him about his earnest gallantry and his petulant obsession with his honour. They become chaste companions through a series of picaresque and repetitive adventures, while his character, as little more than an embodiment of chivalry, remains utterly unengaging, and she is blankly enigmatic. Wide angled shots of the glorious Provencal landscape form the backdrop to their accomplished horsemanship, adding an epic dimension to the tale as they escape from the enclosed, death traps of the towns to these vast spaces with infinite horizons.

At two hours and 20 minutes, the series of narrow escapes and brushes with death becomes repetitive, encouraging the mind to wander into technical speculations about the make up effects of the cholera victims, the hundreds of impeccably detailed sets, the thousands of costumes, the sense of surfeit. With its emphasis on spectacle above all, this is the French heritage film at its least interesting, made by the man who, with Cyrano de Bergerac gave the genre's popularity a resounding boost. No effort has been spared in the execution of detail making this the most expensive French film ever made. Like its central character, it remains pretty but vacuous.

Luke Clancy adds

"Loch Ness" (PG) Omniplex, UCIs, Virgin, Dublin

If there was a scrap of Highlands aerial photography left over after last year's orgy of kilted epics, director John Henderson seems to have unearthed it for Loch Ness, his unexpectedly engaging tale of the hunt for that most timorous of big beasties, Nessie.

The shadow of William Wallace certainly lies over the heathery glens, as cryptozoologist Dr Jonathan Dempsey (Ted Danson) jets into Inverness, equipped with an LA hangover and the latest in satellite and computer surveillance equipment the nul plus ultra of that go "ping". His task to sort out this monster business once and for all.

On the way, he gets crusty love and haggis from his woolly boarding house keeper (Joely Richardson) and a wee dram of disdain from the local water bailiff, (a dour and somnambulant telephone call from Ian Holm), before winding up as a born again Green.

Between them, Henderson and screenwriter John Fusco more than compensate for some stiff plotting like Mel Gibson, they are in the running for the Oscar for most blatant use of Chris Vogler's "mythic structure" by speedily mixing genres, casting off as an electronic western, drifting into an eco aware Arthurian quest before diving by way of Jim Henson's Creature Shop into Jurassic territory.

Henderson does an admirable job of organising his cross genre fertilisations and keeping his ship load of hokum on the road. He even has enough imagination left over to conjure up a sequence of extravagantly resonant scenes, as Dempsey performs an electronic sweep of the loch a stylish reactivation of the cowboy topos of the great cattle round up before sinking below the murky waters, pursued by an after wash of Scotch bottles, beer cans, keyboards, computers.